The Music Classroom and Students with Autism by Seth Murphy
The two articles that I found while researching on students within music classrooms with autism were very informative about the disorder itself, as well as citing many helpful hints and solutions for assessment and implementation of differentiation for these students. I am hopeful that the information that I will provide through the following will give insight to music educators who may have students with autism within their inclusive classroom settings, and also hope to provide a display of these students’ disability to teachers in other content areas.
The autistic student, as stated in the article, “Raising Aspirations: Increasing the Participation of Students with Autistic Spectrum Disorders,” Blamires and Gee explain that students with the disorder tend to have trouble clearly making sense of the world as whole to begin with, much less, trying to make any sense of the world of music and all of its stipulations, manipulatives, and formulas. The article then goes further to explain that students with autism experience impairments which are three-fold. First, students experience impairment with social interaction, meaning they have difficulty with social relationships with other students, sometimes appearing indifferent and distant from others. Second, autistic students experience impairment with social communication, mainly meaning they do not understand inflections in the voice, facial expressions, or common gestures, all normal to people without the disorder to help infer how another person feels or wants you to feel, but not to the student with autism. Third, autistic students experience a difficulty with imagination. This means that they have a difficulty in developing interpersonal and creative skills. This can be a real challenge in the music classroom especially (Blamires and Gee, 2002).
How do we accommodate classroom activities and situations for those students that have an autistic spectrum disorder? An article entitled, “Modifications for Students with Autism,” by the National Autistic Society, provides many examples of differentiation for students with autism. First, since these students usually have a high rating of anxiety within social situations, i.e. the 35+ student music classroom as it were, these students may need to have more regularly scheduled breaks during a single class period than other students, just to be able to get away from the environment for a few minutes to be able to gain emotional and psychological homeostasis before re-joining the rest of the class again. This is greatly important to me as a music educator, because it is really difficult for autistic students to be able to perform at the same level as other students in my classes, especially since I have the students play by themselves for the class very often, as a check for comprehension, and also a monitoring of student progress. However, my differentiation for the student with autism should be to have them perform either for me by themselves in a private setting, or have them record themselves playing the same material I ask of the other students, but also in a more private setting, possibly with a resource instructor for support.
Another common difficulty with autistic students, again stated in the National Autistic Society’s journal, is the ability to learn within an environment. For example, some autistic students perform better in a room with less lighting, or less bright lighting, than those rooms with the opposite in respect to lighting. Also, these students may have difficulties learning within a classroom that has a great deal of noise, lighting changes, or different colors around the room surrounding them. This is a very difficult part of the disorder to understand for those of us who have never experienced the qualities of the disorder ourselves. Some suggestions that have been made by the same article to facilitate learning for the autistic student in the music classroom are turning off half of the lights in the classroom for the said class that a student with autism is enrolled, designing instruction to include the least amount of changes in hearing environment, i.e., using recordings and overhead or SmartBoard projections wisely, or not at all, and also making these recordings, score samples, and other presentations available to the autistic students for later reference, just in case they were unable to focus and remain attentive the first time they were presented. I feel as if this modification is very simple to use, especially since it is very easy to place recordings and/or written presentations on a USB flash drive or CD.
There are many challenges that the student with autism faces each and everyday, especially within the music classroom with the amount of diversity and variety of activities performed each and every class period. However, it seems to be highly possible to reach out to these students and facilitate their situation within the classroom, and outside of the classroom likewise, to support educational growth in the music content area. It would seem as well that music itself would play as a source of therapy for the autistic student, mainly because of the likely emotional support that music gives to everyone each day of our lives. I hope to be able to provide this support as a music educator, and also hope to be able to use this information gained as a tool when and if I ever have the opportunity to guide the progression of an autistic student myself.
by Seth Murphy
The two articles that I found while researching on students within music classrooms with autism were very informative about the disorder itself, as well as citing many helpful hints and solutions for assessment and implementation of differentiation for these students. I am hopeful that the information that I will provide through the following will give insight to music educators who may have students with autism within their inclusive classroom settings, and also hope to provide a display of these students’ disability to teachers in other content areas.
The autistic student, as stated in the article, “Raising Aspirations: Increasing the Participation of Students with Autistic Spectrum Disorders,” Blamires and Gee explain that students with the disorder tend to have trouble clearly making sense of the world as whole to begin with, much less, trying to make any sense of the world of music and all of its stipulations, manipulatives, and formulas. The article then goes further to explain that students with autism experience impairments which are three-fold. First, students experience impairment with social interaction, meaning they have difficulty with social relationships with other students, sometimes appearing indifferent and distant from others. Second, autistic students experience impairment with social communication, mainly meaning they do not understand inflections in the voice, facial expressions, or common gestures, all normal to people without the disorder to help infer how another person feels or wants you to feel, but not to the student with autism. Third, autistic students experience a difficulty with imagination. This means that they have a difficulty in developing interpersonal and creative skills. This can be a real challenge in the music classroom especially (Blamires and Gee, 2002).
How do we accommodate classroom activities and situations for those students that have an autistic spectrum disorder? An article entitled, “Modifications for Students with Autism,” by the National Autistic Society, provides many examples of differentiation for students with autism. First, since these students usually have a high rating of anxiety within social situations, i.e. the 35+ student music classroom as it were, these students may need to have more regularly scheduled breaks during a single class period than other students, just to be able to get away from the environment for a few minutes to be able to gain emotional and psychological homeostasis before re-joining the rest of the class again. This is greatly important to me as a music educator, because it is really difficult for autistic students to be able to perform at the same level as other students in my classes, especially since I have the students play by themselves for the class very often, as a check for comprehension, and also a monitoring of student progress. However, my differentiation for the student with autism should be to have them perform either for me by themselves in a private setting, or have them record themselves playing the same material I ask of the other students, but also in a more private setting, possibly with a resource instructor for support.
Another common difficulty with autistic students, again stated in the National Autistic Society’s journal, is the ability to learn within an environment. For example, some autistic students perform better in a room with less lighting, or less bright lighting, than those rooms with the opposite in respect to lighting. Also, these students may have difficulties learning within a classroom that has a great deal of noise, lighting changes, or different colors around the room surrounding them. This is a very difficult part of the disorder to understand for those of us who have never experienced the qualities of the disorder ourselves. Some suggestions that have been made by the same article to facilitate learning for the autistic student in the music classroom are turning off half of the lights in the classroom for the said class that a student with autism is enrolled, designing instruction to include the least amount of changes in hearing environment, i.e., using recordings and overhead or SmartBoard projections wisely, or not at all, and also making these recordings, score samples, and other presentations available to the autistic students for later reference, just in case they were unable to focus and remain attentive the first time they were presented. I feel as if this modification is very simple to use, especially since it is very easy to place recordings and/or written presentations on a USB flash drive or CD.
There are many challenges that the student with autism faces each and everyday, especially within the music classroom with the amount of diversity and variety of activities performed each and every class period. However, it seems to be highly possible to reach out to these students and facilitate their situation within the classroom, and outside of the classroom likewise, to support educational growth in the music content area. It would seem as well that music itself would play as a source of therapy for the autistic student, mainly because of the likely emotional support that music gives to everyone each day of our lives. I hope to be able to provide this support as a music educator, and also hope to be able to use this information gained as a tool when and if I ever have the opportunity to guide the progression of an autistic student myself.
References:
Blamires, M. and Gee, S. (2002) Raising Aspirations: Increasing the Participation of Students with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (Social Communication Difficulties) in
Higher Education. Retrieved from http://education.cant.ac.uk/xplanatory/assets/documents/aspihereportv041.DOC
National Autistic Society. (n.d.) Modifications for Students with Autism. Retrieved from
http://www.nas.org/nas/jsp/polypoly.jsp?d=108&a=3276